I haven’t followed all your coverage at Davos, but did you get to attend this panel? This is the one I would have wished newspaper owners attended. http://www.metaprinter.com/?p=1738

Said someone is full of it.

CEOs and other employees are answerable every day to their boards.

And, if govts would stop giving them money, the only money that they’d risk is money given to their care by folks who can take it away at any moment.

Until govt got involved, GM’s follies weren’t my concern.

you should watch this video;

http://copytaste.com/cc596i3

Wrong.

> fiscal stimulus, which only government can provide

Govts aren’t the only ones who can spend money, but they are the ones most likely to “spend dumb”.

> avoiding protectionism, which only government can have the courage and will to do

Jesus H Christ on a pogostick. It takes self-serving govt agent to say something so blatantly false. Protectionism is entirely a govt action. My neighbors can’t stop me from buying something from elsewhere, only govt can.

I hope this brings us to the clear understanding that we can’t rely on leadership to get us out of this – after all, they’re responsible for the gluttony that led us here. There is no leadership. There is no guru. Time to stop outsourcing that…

Rather, it’s up to us. Unbridled and bootstrapped productivity. The best thing our “leadership” can do for us is to get out of our way and maybe even knock down some barriers. The best thing we can do is to communicate that to them loudly and clearly. We don’t need their leadership – because it’s not what it markets itself to be.

And the number of incumbents who get voted out is . . .

Your post showed a great deal of integrity. Getting an invite to Davos has got to be glamorous and gratifying. Nevertheless, you’ve just smacked them one upside the head. I wonder if you’ll get invited back next time.

Kind regards,
Evan

The thought today that we should look to Davos for leadership seems laughable. I think this is the end of Davos. Enjoy the slopes.

(BTW Your book has got the top spot in the COOP bookstore at MIT)

The day after the Crash of 1987, a couple of people decided to start a company at the bottom of the market. It was Cisco Systems. And if I recall correctly, in 2000, shortly after returning to Apple (and at a time when the company’s viability was still in question), I heard Steve Jobs say near the end of a MacWorld keynote, an aside that I never recall reading anywhere, but something so poignant that it rings in my head today:

“We’re going to invent our way out of this.”

Fast-forward a few years later, and it was clear what he had in mind.

Depending on big government handouts for the hubris and excess of the last 10 years won’t fix this mess. Depending on government to remedy our ills won’t be enough. Unless you anticipate with glee the possibility of high inflation that could follow. Instead, I think it will take a collective effort of all of us to turn the ship around. The innovation that we are seeing as the result of the Internet has created many jobs and opportunities that never existed before. As Jeff stated in his book, “What Would Google Do” shows that people who think different, be it Sergei Brin and Larry Page, or Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos or others, don’t see the world ending. In fact, some voices not heard at Davos might see this time as an opportunity.

So here’s to the two guys in the garage. To the Indian man who saw a future in microloans. To the Tim Berners-Lees of this world, who had a simple idea and acted on it. And to any angry young man or woman impatient with the status quo, and with the guts to think different.

THAT is what will get us out of this mess. Not the overstuffed platypuses proffering puffy platitudes over plates of hors d’oeuvres in Davos.

Agreeing with Martin Sorrell, which I have encountered myself in Davos attending as a technology pioneer for ((truphone)) as one of the brightest minds, I am very worried about the involvement of government in particular when they spend so much of our money lending to the same banks which paid out bonus to managers to drive up house prices of my London borough to levels where normal people had to move out. I thought banks should be in the business to lend to us. As an entrepreneur I have always believed in value creation through hard work, focus, stamina and technological innovation. But maybe this is a time to think about some of our principles, working habits, incentives. It seems lot’s has gone wrong in many industries, in family affairs, in personal habits, in our treatment of our environment and how we treat other species on our planet, so maybe it is time for a revolution and rather than a small paradigm shift. It seems Obama is such a revolutionary personality, but I wonder if it goes far enough, considering what we already mutated into.

However governments like the Obama administration got lots of things right, first they did not waste 96 hours to trip out to Davos, Instead they are getting on to get the job done to get us out of this mess. Would I be Obama I would have given strict order to stay home and get work done to everybody in my administration. Is the US again on the forefront and why in difficult others leaders give keynote speeches instead of getting the job done.

Isn’t it much smarter to watch and read the speeches by Putin and other so called world leaders on your PC or Blackberry back home at the fireplace in the White House over a cup of tea. The advantages are huge, you wake up relaxed without jet lag the next day, you can kiss your kids good night and enjoy a lovely innocent smile, you can relax and consider the all important content of Davos and formulate action items for your next meeting to change the world for a better world tomorrow.

Good night!

The Economist has been on top of (or in front of) the crisis for years, and this week they had a great 14-page survey on the future of finance.

http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12957709

While they hit their normal points on roots of crisis and potential remedy, the part that stuck out for me was not just the culpability of people inside the financial and regulatory firms, but to a lesser extent the culpability of the investing public as a whole.

Leaving aside fraudulent mortgages or people overextending themselves, bubbles are built on innocent — but not innocuous — mass optimism. We all demanded perfect safety for our money, while simultaneously demanding huge returns — oh, and also great service and low fees.

There were certainly people at Countrywide, Fannie, Bank of America, etc. who stood up and said “this is madness”. They may have even been believed; they were they either told to sit down, or perhaps they even sat themselves down. In a wave of mass optimism, no one likes a pooper. The behavior of many firms was borderline criminal, and no one can excuse it. At the same time, any rational firm would have been driven out of business here before the crash happened.

It’s a terrible choice to have to make: ride the wave of hysteria and hope you survive the wipeout, or just give up and drown at sea.

“When ideas fail, words come in very handy.”

–Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
poet, playwright, novelist and statesman

I learned that many people become leaders because they are the alpha males, the loudest voices in the room. But that does not mean that your voice carries the weight of a great idea. It’s just that your force of personality is more powerful than others.

Happy skiing, Jeff. Maybe that’s what the leaders there should do too. It’s amazing what ideas you can have talking with someone on a chairlift.

really great, though sobering, summary. I think you have the best description of Davos I have read so far: a lot of “hot mountain air with little oxygen.”

The dismissal of transparency is not surprising, but it is frightening — transparency is “ok in principle” but not in actuality because the affected might then actually see what the banks and corporations are doing.

enjoy the slopes, but please do keep up the reports.